A new date in the food festival calendar celebrates the growth of
self-sufficiency – even under the M4
.

When did homegrown spuds and fresh-laid eggs become essential on the fashionable table? Producing our own food has never been more chic or dinner-party desirable, but this is not a regrettable fad: for once, trendiness, good sense and good food have actually come together.

An interesting addition to the season’s mainstream food festivals, such as Ludlow and Abergavenny, is next weekend’s Sissinghurst Smallholding Fair, which attracted 3,000 visitors when it launched last year. This year, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Telegraph’s Sarah Raven in attendance, promises to be even bigger.

According to Liz Wright, who has edited Smallholder magazine for the past 27 years, the movement started in the Seventies. “There had always been families growing their own in the country, but now people who weren’t born to it want to have a go.”

Pioneers were initially inspired by self-sufficiency guru John Seymour as much as by the mishaps of Tom and Barbara on The Good Life, but the real explosion has been in the wake of Fearnley-Whittingstall’s television programmes about his own smallholding, River Cottage, which first aired in 1999. Sales of hen-keeping kits, pig arks and the like have soared, and last year Tesco started stocking Smallholder – something, says Wright, “we could never have imagined 10 years ago”.

But what constitutes a smallholding? Wright is firm. “Some people say that you have to have a cow, but that’s rubbish. An allotment, a garden – anywhere that you are producing food counts.”

Nor does it have to be in the country. Sara Ward, a mother of two who blogs at www.hencorner.com, is based in west London. When I walked to her house, under the M4 flyover and over a triple carriageway lined with grim office blocks, the only patches of green in the concrete jungle were the signs pointing to central London.

Just five minutes further on, I arrived at a pretty square of Victorian terraced cottages. The door of the corner house flew open before I could reach it, and Ward came to greet me, appropriately Darling Buds of May-esque with her rosy cheeks and curly hair, attended by children Macy, eight, and James, 10.

She led me down a hall lined with elegantly arranged antique mirrors (husband, Andy, is an interior designer) and through the conservatory to the sunlit garden. I was expecting to see every inch turned over to cultivation, but the initial view was of a medium-sized lawn with apple trees, a hammock and a tree house. Then I spotted the hens pecking in a long enclosure at one end, the artichoke plants next to a pear tree and raised beds filled with tumbling runner bean vines.

As we explored the garden, no bigger than the average croquet lawn, we sipped on Ward’s homemade cider, amber, cool and apple-fragrant with a mellow roughness. “We designate a day in autumn and ask everyone we know with access to an apple tree to bring fruit along, and we press it all. We crack open the first bottle with the Boxing Day ham.”

Ward doesn’t kid herself that she can be self-sufficient on the five raised beds (each 11 sq ft), a cold frame and a couple of flower beds. “But pretty much every meal, we’ll have something that we produced,” she says. A tagine is spiked with homemade chutney and eaten with fresh runner beans, steak is served with apple-and-chilli jelly and fresh tomatoes.

They supplement this with an organic vegetable box. “We grow things which are expensive, or favourites, or really special when they are spanking fresh.” So there are rubble sacks full of plants for new potatoes, which are spectacular if eaten within hours of being harvested, but “there’s no point eating homegrown old potatoes.”

Space has been found for cauliflowers, turban squash (grown from seeds salvaged from a squash in the veg box that “looked interesting”), courgettes, celeriac and tomatoes, but the French beans didn’t come up “I think the mice got them,” says Ward.

Feast or famine is the lot of the gardener or smallholder, but dealing with gluts is part of the fun. The freezer plays a big part – “producing a pavlova at Christmas made with our own eggs and raspberries is pretty special” – as does preserving. As we ate a lunch of Ward’s home-made Camembert-style cheese and raw runner beans we’d pulled from the plant, we shared the table with marjoram drying in the sun, shallots and garlic.

Not everything comes easily. Flocks of parakeets (legend has it they are descended from the birds released from nearby Isleworth Studios after the filming of The African Queen) attack the apples. A fox got Linen the hen, leaving it dead on the lawn. “I plucked it and gutted it, and found all the part-formed eggs inside like a string of beads, do you remember, Macy?”

Macy nodded solemnly, and then patted the compost bin. “My pet hen died too. She’s in there now.” Luckily Butternut the Buff Orpington is broody and sitting on some fertilised eggs which came by post (there is no cockerel at Hen Corner), so there will be new chicks soon.

Macy ran off to join in an apple-throwing fight with visiting friends and Ward set to making piccalilli. She works three days a week, volunteers for the local church and is a school governor, so how can she manage vegetable growing, hen keeping, and cooking, too?

“We have lots of commitments as a busy family. Finding the time when something needs to be done is hard. But hens are very low maintenance, much easier than people think. Look at wartime Britain – everyone kept hens.”

Social networking is a great resource for new smallholders. “You can ask people a question about a sick hen, say, and get an answer in minutes. Faster than the vet.” But it’s important to take stories of agricultural triumph with a pinch of salt, Ward added as she stirred the crisp vegetables into the mustardy sauce.

“Don’t get downhearted. People tend to talk about the successes rather than the failures. They only put up pictures of the good things!”

Munching on last year’s piccalilli, still crisp and fresh tasting, I’d say this is definitely one of the good things.

The Smallholding Fair is being held at Sissinghurst Castle on Saturday 13 and Sunday 14 August between 10.30am-5pm. £4 adult, £1 child. For more information, call 01580 710700 or visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst